Snow White Gets Literally Lost in the Uncanny Valley: Review

There’s so much to unpack about Disney’s new “live-action” remake of Snow White that it’s almost hard to figure out where to begin. Which of the movie’s most bewildering elements should be addressed first? Let’s start with this: As much of a mess as the 2025 movie based on the classic animated film might be, it’s not an offensive remake.

In fact, Snow White works hard to avoid any controversy — despite one of the more memorably controversial press cycles of recent years. And it’s not all bad: Rachel Zegler sings beautifully and is an charismatic lead. There are some very cute CGI critters (my favorite was the hedgehog). The movie’s fundamental message of rejecting tyrants and being good to other people is definitely one the world could stand to hear right now. It’s just that the rest of the movie is unfortunately bogged down by some choices that defy explanation.

Remake director Marc Webb and writer Erin Cressida Wilson were in a unique position coming into Snow White, because while the original 1937 film clocks in at one hour and 23 minutes, it’s got maybe about 15 minutes of real plot: Evil queen obsessed with her own beauty feels threatened by her princess step-daughter and tries to have her killed. Otherwise, most of the movie is Snow White singing, hanging out with very cute animated animals, and instructing seven admittedly unsanitary dwarves on the importance of good hygiene.

Disney’s live-action remakes all tend to be much longer in runtime than the original animated films, thanks to the addition of some additional, ultimately extraneous business: Beauty and the Beast used its extra screen time to establish Belle as a pants-wearing feminist inventor, while The Little Mermaid added some muttering about the geopolitical and trade issues facing a largely isolated island nation.

Those movies already had a lot going on plot-wise, though. Snow White, meanwhile, was perhaps as close to a blank slate for Webb and Cressida Wilson as you could possibly imagine. While there were a few obvious elements to include from the animated film, no one was going to be sad about the absence of, say, the five-minute sequence where the dwarfs forcibly bathe each other. So what’s been added in its place is a whole character arc for Snow White in which she first wishes she could be a leader like her father, and then eventually… becomes a leader like her father, able to challenge the Queen’s despotic rule over the kingdom.

In place of the 1937 personality-free prince who saves Snow White with true love’s kiss, we get Andrew Burnap as Jonathan, who leads a gang of lovable thieves/actors/rebels/people who like to live in the forest, steals freely from the Queen’s kitchens, and likes to judge princesses as being useless until they prove their mettle to him. At which point, he’s more than up for the idea of kissing.

(The Disney live-action remake, as a subgenre, can usually be relied upon to insert more modern sensibilities and/or confront outdated gender norms. Yet, lest you worry about there being too much wokeness in this movie, there’s definitely no discussion about issues of consent as they relate to unconscious young women being kissed.)

Burnap brings the comedic energy of a very different movie with him, but he’s at least vaguely fun, and he and Zegler do have some chemistry, even if the blunt force execution of their scenes together removes the spontaneity from it. The only thing keeping Jonathan from feeling like a fully-realized character is the fact that he’s more than a little reminiscent of Flynn Rider from Rapunzel. Though his floppy hair has a bit more of a ’90s Skeet Ulrich/Jordan Catalano vibe (complimentary, at least if you imprinted hard on ’90s teen idols).

That’s not the only element which feels drawn from another Disney movie, as the film’s climax echoes the climax of the 2023 animated feature Wish. Which is only a spoiler for the seven dozen people who actually saw Wish.

The movie begins by aggressively declaring itself to be a musical, with composers Pasek and Paul bringing their very hit-or-miss songwriting talents to the movie’s original numbers. Even as a Greatest Showman defender, I struggle to remember any of the new songs except two: “Princess Problems,” performed by Burnap and Zegler, is a comedy bop with some clever lyrics, and “Waiting on a Wish” is a fascinating failure of an “I Want” song. (The entire song is about Snow White is waiting for the moment when she might become a strong leader like her father. “Waiting” and “wishing” aren’t exactly active words.)

Narratively, there are a lot of flaws, but it’s aesthetically where the movie really falls apart. There are some very sequences that are very pretty in execution, but the whole concept of what a live-action remake should look like becomes incredibly muddled, as Webb tries to apply cartoon logic where it really doesn’t belong.

Take the dress worn by Snow White (Rachel Zegler) for most of the movie, a blue-and-yellow gown that’s a pretty direct recreation of the classic gown seen in the original movie. Translating something from animation to live-action (however we define “live action” these days) carries with it a certain expectation of grounding. And yet, Snow White wears this one dress (she’s not carrying around a backpack of duplicates) while running through a terrifying forest, cleaning a very dirty bachelor pad, running through yet more woods, and stealing a horse. The dress, including its stiff white collar, remains pristine throughout.

Okay, the outer skirt gets ripped off (revealing the bright yellow petticoat below) during Snow White’s initial run through the woods, right around the time she falls in a dang river. That’s right, she gets totally submerged in a river, yet the dress still looks flawless. It’s the sort of thing that our minds totally excuse in an animated movie. In the live action arena, it only adds to the unmotivated unreality of what we’re seeing.

Another area where the costuming serves as a nice metaphor is the sequined gowns of Gal Gadot’s evil Queen: flashy, tacky, and obviously fake. There is no effort made to add extra depth or insight into the character, who’s literally only ever described as Evil Queen, and Gadot’s performance feels like a direct reflection of that, as inauthentic as the jewels she wears.

There are some actors who work very well within a specific context — many movie star careers have been built on less talent than Gadot actually has, but here Gadot is way out of her element, falling into camp territory more often than not. And the Queen’s obsession with being “the fairest of them all” becomes more of a thread connected to her seemingly unquenchable desire for power. (At one point, she makes all of her subjects come out of their homes and bow to her, once she’s reclaimed the “fairest of them all” title.)

And then… there are the dwarfs. When we talk about the Uncanny Valley, we’re talking about the experience of watching something on screen that our brains can’t recognize as real or fake, to the point of being unsettling. Snow White’s seven new friends, with their photorealistic expressions embedded in their very clearly CGI bodies, represent almost the platonic ideal of this concept. The movie’s new take on “Whistle While You Work,” expanding on the lyrics from the original film version and featuring a lot more CGI flourishes, is almost like a fever dream in execution.

At the end of the day, the best parts of Snow White are the parts that feel genuinely real and authentic. If only there were more of those, and less screen time spent dancing in the realm of mind-breaking absurdity. It’s not that the dwarfs seem like a rush job or don’t look well-blended into the live-action cinematography. They just represent the impossible balance between fantasy and reality being attempted here, one which the brain actively rejects as nonsense. Uncanny, you might say.

Snow White arrives in theaters on Friday, March 21st.